Fasque House

Fasque, also known as Fasque House, or Fasque Castle is a mansion in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, situated near the village of Fettercairn, in the former county of Kincardineshire.

Fasque was the property of the Ramsays of Balmain, and the present house was completed around 1809, replacing an earlier house. It was purchased in 1829 by Sir John Gladstone, 1st Baronet, father of William Ewart Gladstone, later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who often stayed there. Fasque was a family home of the Gladstones until the 1930s, and was open to the public during the last quarter of the 20th century. In 2010 Fasque House was bought by Fasque House Properties Ltd and restoration work was begun.

The name comes from the Gaelic word faskie, meaning "safety", or "dwelling place", and for reasons of potential tautology, "house" was never officially added. The name is a baroque, eighteenth-century corruption of the original Gaelic word.

A previous house, known as Fasque, or Faskie, was located roughly 50 yards (46 m) north of the present site. In about the 1750s, Sir Alexander Ramsay, 6th Baronet of Balmain, who had been a local Member of Parliament, planted the beech avenues that survive today.William Adam (1689–1748) prepared a plan for the house which is illustrated in his Vitruvius Scoticus, although it was never executed. By 1790, the house was growing increasingly prone to damp, and was demolished only forty years after completion.

Sir Alexander, by then known as Alexander Ramsay-Irvine, died without heir in 1806, and the estate passed to his nephew, Alexander Burnett, who was made a baronet in 1806, and adopted the Ramsay surname. Although begun by Sir Alexander Ramsay-Irvine, the current house was not completed until about 1809. Approximately £30,000 was spent on the project. The house took over ten years to construct, with contemporary guide books describing its central hallway being open to the elements, as the world's largest indoor double spiral staircase was being constructed at the back of the hall. Following his death in May 1810, the younger Alexander's 2nd. son, also Alexander Ramsay, inherited the estate and the baronetcy, and kept Fasque for 19 years before having to sell it in the face of rising costs of its upkeep.

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